I’m lazy.

Shocked cat is shocked, right?

The blog (and plugins) are updated to the most recent versions, but it looks like there’s some issues with a couple. I’m sure that is akin to daggers in your little hearts. I’ve got lots of interesting (to me) stuff to rant about, just no time to actually put pen to paper. I’ll try to carve out some time real soon nah, but you know how that goes.

edit: The author of the last.fm widget (see right sidebar) is aware of the issue and it’s apparently a problem with the 2.8 version of the html/http api. He’s apparently got a ticket in with WordPress so it’ll be fixed soonish.

A: Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis bored.

As I write this it’s Friday night and I am still waiting for a server to finish virtualizing so I can proceed with the rest of the project plan and possibly get to sleep before sunrise. Given that I am prone to bouts of lazy and vigor of equal and epic measure I’ve been queuing up random posts for the last 2 hours and just setting a future publish date (or leaving them as drafts)  so it looks like I’m all chatty. Twixsy hobbitses, am I rite?

Anyway, someone in my guild mentioned that he read my blog and has tried to comment in the past but didn’t have any luck. So after turned comments back on (no idea how that got fucked up) I also went ahead and linked up to Facebook. People hate logging in to <yet_another_website_001>. Options, we haz dem!* I actually got the idea from Lum’s blog, he did the same thing (although a different method) a few months back with great success.

The guide I followed was a pretty manual process, but once I got a handle on the nuance it was slick as could be.

So yeah. Fuck you WP-FacebookConnect. I’ve programmed professionally (briefly) and have no issues reading docs and hacking on PHP, but holy christ getting that shit to work right was a nightmare. I finally gave up and implemented the OpenID plugin. So there’s that at least. I installed 2 plugins and configured the shit and it was working. No them hax, no bullshit. It just worked.

A pleasant surprise indeed.

In other news, I just popped the newest version of the wp-armory plugin which features a 3D modeler. More shit on the sidebar? Yes. Yes it is. Suck it.

… On second thought, that’s horrible. It’s off now. Look right for proof. —————->

Aren’t you glad you asked?

edit: Let’s just go ahead and add the OpenID plugs to the FUCK YOU list. I leave this only as a signpost, to illustrate how far we have yet to go before all this stuff “just plain works”.

Came across a good article the other day on improving the performance of Wordpress. It holds more relevancy if you run your own server or are paying for more access than your typical mass-market hosting environment.

I pride myself on reading revision histories but somehow the fact that Wordpress stores post-revisions flew right past without me knowing.

Anywho, if you run a WP blog take a gander.

As of last Monday it’s become the former, not latter. No new news beyond that, just income and whatnot.

I’ve got a slew of WoW stuff I just never pushed, I’ll get to that at some point. I’m still struggling with a good and simple way to manage graphics. I’ve got the wow stuff in a folder with the perl album scripts ran against them and it works ok to generate blog-sized thumbs for posting, but the size of everything is kind of a pain. Stuff I’m posting nowhere but in the blog are actually going in the Wordpress uploader thing which seems to be working fine. At least those will be “easily” portable.

Maybe Picasa web albums or Flikr or somesuch would work. Bleh.

The upgrade is done, but some plugins and theme crap have to be updated/fixed. Also, I seem to have deleted something, somewhere. Not sure what, yet. The new version has a much-improved (and non-plugin) media manager thing so I’m slowly converting some of the blog-only graphics to that so some links may be toast while I complete the move.

The long awaited 0.2 release of my first WP plugin is finally here. My apologies for the delay, I’ll do better on the next release…

This version adds support for limiting the maximum number of tags displayed, some code clean-up and approximately 5 new lines in the readme. I’ve adjusted some of the titles/filenames/etc. to be more clear. ITC seems as good an acronym as any, so the name will likely stay.

The new version can be downloaded from my projects page.

see also: ITC 0.1
update: Someone added the plug to a codex-style site. Neato.

At one point in time I wasn’t an entirely useless coder. Then I spent 10 years working in IT and all of my useful skills atrophied. Oh, and about eleventybillion new languages/standards/etc hit the fan. If something is fugly, feel free to laugh.

My stuff is (generally) licensed under the GNU GPL, see specific files for information related to those packages.

• Improved TagCloud Widget v0.2 (posted 11.3.07)

ITC is a WordPress plugin/widget which adds functionality to the existing tag-cloud generator.

At its inception ITC was designed specifically to counter a problem I was having with the native tag-cloud in WordPress 2.3. I like the new taxonomy features and I like using them accurately so I can retrace my thoughts. The problem is that even with a low-post blog like mine (~75 posts as of this writing) you end up with a massive cloud with 1019250 terms. At the time there were plenty of plugins that would limit the total number of tags displayed, but that was coming at the problem from the wrong end in my view.

Currently, ITC allows you to clip from both ends of the tag stream. On the front end, you can specify the maximal number of tags to display. This function is built into the WP code, just not exposed. The default (as of WP 2.3) is 45. On the other side, the plugin allows you to clip off tags based on the number of times they are used. A value of 1 is usually quite sufficient, but any number below the max(count) of your most-used tag should work.

To-do list:

• Add support for multiple widgets with different configurations.
• Add support for the remaining (but unexposed) WP native options.

“See a need, fill a need.”

I present the initial release of my 1st complete and functional WordPress plugin.

Improved Tag Cloud 0.1

ITC is designed specifically to combat a problem I have with the normal tagging cloud and related plugins currently available. Namely, the number of terms generated by someone who’s pretty bonkers about accurate tagging/searching. This blog with it’s sub-100 posts already has well over 100 tags and that’s only because I was distilling them down to keep the cloud small!

All ITC does is ask you what the minimum amount of posts you require a tag to have before it’s displayed in your cloud. For my blog a setting of ONE actually works perfectly! Your mileage may vary. I didn’t really test it (or code against it) but an excessively high number would likely produce … uh … nothing? Don’t do that!

I have also added a “My Stuff” page to the index as well where I’ll chronicle my ongoing coding exploits. THE HORROR!

This is my first foray into WordPress hacking, so be gentle.

update: The E! True Hollywood Story on this project was that I wanted to generate some code I could show a potential employer that was applicable to their business. Long story short, they kicked me to the curb after (what I thought) was two excellent interviews with some of the nicest people you’d care to meet. I guess you never can tell with people…

Minor housekeeping and such this evening. Pay no mind if you’re looking for actual, you know, words and stuff.

Dropped the 2.3.1 wordpress upgrade and a couple wp-plugs in/out/upgraded. I dropped the Technorati tag generator in favor of a newer iconic one. Saves an extra line on the posts and makes it nice and easy to cloud into the local site or techno. Still looking for good cloud and link widgets. I can’t believe someone else hasn’t hit on something similar to what I want yet. Oh well, maybe I’ll finish writing mine.

I was moving through the Akismet catches from last week and there was actually a comment-spam from a technorati category. Not sure if that’s supposed to be funny or sad, but I chuckled…

edit: Some days I just don’t understand…

In my previous lamentations regarding the recent Wordpress 2.3 upgrade I bemoaned the lack of good options for splicing the new tagging into Technorati, which I had already grown accustomed to using. Will Garcia over at Gormful.com apparently shared my angst and, as coders do, solved the problem.

Enter WP23-Technorati-Tags. A few code changes to the theme and voila. The already-handled tagging supplies both local-cloud links and Technorati links. It’s a little redundant, ’tis true, but I’m sure I (or most likely someone else) will find a more elegant way to present that information. On first blush I’m thinking that use a “cloud” display for the local tags and leave the techno ones in the clean list format.

hmm, that is a good idea. Mayhaps I’ll look into that!

Now if I could only get WP to automatically put ALL of my posts into the same, single, ALREADY DEFAULT category we’d be golden.

I love upgrades.